The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  The world is in a terrible state of chassis as Joxer has it and I want to watch its chaos from a little distance and make a leisurely and I hope long preparation for death.157 I love the world and its insanity and despite the fact that I am a highly romantic and passionate man, I find almost all things amusing – especially passion and romance in others. E's and my wildest quarrels are fundamentally ridiculously funny. Certainly in retrospect. And our leaders are without exception grotesquely and ludicrously comical. Brezhnev and Heath, Nixon and Agnew, Fred Kennedy and Humphreys and Pompidou and Willy Brandt and Mao Tse Tung and Cho en Lai and Nasser and Uncle Tom Cobley.158 Watching Nixon making like a man of destiny on the TV talks to the nations about Cambodia is a divertissement unparalleled. Agnew's prolix and sententious rhodomontade is a national joke, and so is his audience.159 Enoch Powell, so fantastically like Oswald Mosley intellectually and emotionally that I'm astonished that no one has remarked on it, is a howl.160 Wilson wrapped in a cocoon of smugness, even in crushing defeat, is a howl. The idea of the queen and all her trappings is high comedy, which reminds me that I have a part in that show shortly when I receive the CBE. There is a great international madness and there always has been but the speed of modern communications accentuates its lunacy and those who don't laugh go mad. Student rebellions, an integral part of our natural history, are either frightening or funny depending on your reaction emotionally. To me they're funny because I know that all those shouting banner-waving little sods are with few exceptions cop-outs and drop-outs. Like striking miners when I was a kid in the valleys. The union leaders had nothing to lose. The losers were the good miners, the lax and lazy ones were merely searching for a holiday – with no pay perhaps but there were always soup kitchens and a little casual labour building a new Co-op or something.161 The people who died inside were people like my brothers who wanted to work. The most laughable strikes of all were those in the twenties when the miners went back after prolonged strikes to much less than they got before they struck.162 The only strikes that really worked were wartime ones. And everybody can shout and bawl as much as they like but they won't change anything fundamental. They will be thrown a scrap or two to stop the barking but human nature is unchanged and unchangeable except over millions of years. There is no difference basically in humanity now than there was 5000 years ago. The same cruelty, the same vices and virtues as ever. The same stupidity and intelligence and in the same proportion. Who can possibly take seriously a student who says ‘down with Nixon and Mao for ever’ or vice versa. Both are clowns. Neither commands our gravity only our laughter. The ‘thoughts of Mao Tse Tung’ are a laugh a thought. Nothing can happen overnight.163 The betterment of mankind will be a triumph of the inevitability of gradualness as the Baron of Passfield said in another context.164 That is if there's to be a triumph at all. So far the gradualness has been so minutely graded that it is invisible to the naked eye. There must be a holocaust one day soon. All the practical man's hope can be is that he is not at its centre, that he is peripheral and do his duty to survive and if possible see that his family survives with him. Here is one man who firmly believes the world to be a delightful place nicely balanced by its horrors. Without sorrow there can be no joy. True happiness is as transient and as ephemeral as true misery, thank god. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.165 The French, American and Russian revolutions changed nothing. Privilege and money still dominate mankind. ‘The Great Experiment’ in the USA is a whacking great spiritual and material failure.166 A handful of men own the country and millions and millions are servants as near to automatons as you can get in a ‘free’ society. And nothing, but nothing at all can change that great amorphous mass, that limited sprawl, that defined shapelessness. It is not even influenced by the last argument it ever heard. It remains the same. This great anonymous multi-headed mob can not be moved to a new idea. It is impossible to persuade a southern redneck that a negro is a human being. They are uneducatable. You can only hope to change this atrophying muscle and make it limber by catching its offspring young. Keep a thing for seven years and you may find a use for it, as the proverb has it. Or the jesuitry ‘Give me a child until its seven,’ or is it 12, ‘and he is mine for life’.167 But even starting now today this minute the process of re-education will take a long time. Only a small percentage of the dumb will be taught to speak and the blind to see and the deaf to hear, therefore the process of re-education will take aeons and aeons. The very system of education must be torn out by the roots and made different, but that itself is so deeply ingrained that it seems impervious to surgery, or transplant. I am convinced that in any group of a hundred people less than a half dozen are capable of fundamental change. They can be easily swayed en masse – I've done it to myself and been swayed – but they are impervious to radical new thoughts. By ‘new thoughts’ I don't mean new in the sense of original – there is no new thought under the sun – but new in the sense of being new to them, to what they've grown up knowing or not knowing, believing or not believing. I read somewhere that the children of Republicans and Democrats and Tories and Labourites almost inevitably become Republicans and Democrats and Tories and Labourites respectively just like their dads. I remember that when it was rumoured in the family that my brother Dai the Policeman had turned Tory we all thought he'd gone mad. In the recent election in Britain which resulted in what the newspapers called sensationally a Tory landslide and sweeping victory an unprecedented volte face of the electorate turned out to be the indifference of the Labour turn-out.168 Nobody had changed. Miners didn't go mad and vote for the Tories. They simply didn't vote at all. Labour will inevitably win again when they can get their supporters to get off their asses and away from the TV and make their marks in the appropriate space. Nothing has changed and regardless of any zeal he may possess Mr Heath will soon be sunk by the great apathy. We can be sure that if the world is still in existence in fifty years’ time, we can be sure that nothing will have changed. You might be a little poorer or a little richer but nothing will have changed to humanity to any measurable extent.

  Friday 26th Am writing this late in the afternoon having stayed upstairs and finished a book about golf and the professional golf tour in the USA called Pro by a pro golfer called Frank Beard.169 [...] I was intrigued by the day to day struggle to win the expenses and by the fact that one could after sufficient mastery of the game become a millionaire as people like Palmer, Player, Nicklaus, Casper et al. have.170 [...]

  I read today in the LA Times that ‘according to biological evolution both humans and sheep – as mammals – have evolved separately, but are derived from a common ancestor that lived aeons ago.’ Very apropos of yesterday's entry.

  The Rommel film is totally chaotic. Nobody knows when I start for sure. [...] I shall fly down on Tuesday which will give me a chance to see Liza before the work starts. [...]

  Saturday 27th [...] I read after a month's procrastination the script called Hammersmith is Out which P. Ustinov had sent. It is very wild and formless but just the kind of thing that I would like to do at the moment. Particularly as it has a splendid part for E too, and a film for both of us is what we've been looking for for a long time. Ustinov is to direct so that should be alright. He should also play one of the smaller parts.171 The whole thing begins and ends in a lunatic asylum and my role is a deadly and totally insane killer called Hammersmith. The idea is not new. Who are mad? Those inside the bin or those outside? In this case both. We might be able to shoot it this fall. I have a fear that I may have left it all too late. We shall know within the next few days I suppose. It should be wildly funny and fun to do, especially with somebody as congenial as Ustinov and as brilliant, and might be a big commercial success to boot and spur.

  [...] French came to discuss business yesterday at our invitation and was dismissed by E in about three minutes flat. [...] Never mind about a year's time for Chrissake, she said – never taking her eyes off the TV screen where Astaire and Leslie Caron were giving us Daddy Long Legs – la
y on Hammersmith Is Out and we'll play it by ear from there.172 [...] She is wholly delightful lately and is beginning to read again. She finished a book for the first time since she went into hospital that age ago. I feel splendid myself as a result. [...]

  It's difficult to know how far to go with the students at Oxford without becoming irresponsible and inciting the drop-outs again. I despise them and wish to concede them nothing but sweeping generalizations will include them. What thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might is really the burden of my message, for there is neither wisdom nor device nor knowledge in the grave whither thou goest.173 I wasted time, said Richard the Second, and now doth time waste me.174 We have left undone those things we ought to have done.175 Increasingly as I get older I regret the things that I should have done, regret the black spaces which I could have filled with some knowledge of no use to anybody except me and though I try to make up for lost time my mind is not what it was and its sponge-like ability to soak up new learning and retain it is sadly impaired by dissipation and age. And trying to concentrate is becoming more and more of a task. The imagination is a wilful creature and keeping it under control is an arduous task. [...]

  Sunday 28th Two more days before I go to Mexico. Tales I hear of the place – San Filipe – are not too encouraging.176 Mean temp 113. Only two restaurants. Population 800. Shark-infested waters. Hurricane season. Only 33 beds in the whole town for visitors, most people living in caravan trailers and tents. No telephone. Only expert pilots can land there. Otherwise OK.

  [...] Saw or started to see film last night called M.A.S.H. Hated it and left after two reels. We had it shown here in the house [...]. The children for the most part enjoyed it – Kate and her friends from next door, two girls and a boy all about 12 to 15 years old. Maria hated it and had nightmares. There was a lot of blood on the screen since the whole thing took place in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea and they showed operations and amputations and ligatures and spouts of blood and stitches. I was bored so left. Went to bed and read a ‘Travis Magee’ thriller by a very competent American writer called John D. Macdonald.177 He is one of those prolific writers like Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner and so on who seem to turn out a book a month.178 Macdonald is a cut above most however and tries to be unsentimentally tough about the decaying morality and mass-production-mania and advertising nightmare of the American way of life. Ends up always with a lump in his throat about the occasional innate nobility of man. Magee is a thoroughly detestable man in his pretended cynicism and muscular pretension and despises with a tired dismissal anybody who is not ‘machismo’ and ‘mucho hombre’ and an inexhaustible stud. There are fairly sick-making lines like ‘he patted her girl-rump’ and ‘he responded to the rampant woman in her’. Another occasion for bile is that this Magee – who is enormous 6ft 5 and as fast as a cat – is called ‘Trav’ by his friends. However, I've learned to skip the sermons when they come up and the yarns and the inconsequential but authentic seeming descriptive backgrounds are very readable. I envy anyone's capacity for such sustained and for the most part sound writing. If he wrote one book a year instead of ten he could be considerable. I don't think I could write a thriller. I don't think I want to even if I could. Such books are meant to be read, not written. Read fast and quickly forgotten and therefore readable again in a couple of years.

  Oh to be in Europe, now that I have to go to work. I want to go everywhere at once. I want simultaneously to be watching the road to Santa Marguerita from Porto Fino through Zeiss binoculars while sunning on the poop deck of the Kalizma. I want to be sitting in front of a log fire in Gstaad in the library in the evening with a rich book in my lap and E in the chair beside me. Baked ham and au gratin potatoes in Gruyere in that hotel there. Trout at the top of Les Diablerets. Raclette in the Olden in Gstaad. More trout in Weissenbach in the restaurant by the river and the canopied wooden bridge. Saddle of lamb in La Réserve. Hors d'oeuvres in La Ferme above Beaulieu or in D'Chez Eux in Paris. Moules Marinieres in La Mediterranea opposite the Opera. Haddock filet a L'Anglaise at Fouquets. Omelette Arnold Bennett on the terrace of the Terrace Suite of the Dorchester on a fine day looking over the park on a Sunday with one powerful bloody Mary under my belt and that beauty always beside me and around. Raw fave and salami and white wine and a game of boule with E in the trattoria underneath the church on the hill outside Rome on the side road from De Laurentiis’ studios to the Raccordo Annulare where the choir chants at 7 in the evening.179 A car tour of the Michelin 3 star restaurants. Annecy and Beaumaniere and a couple of nights at The Hotel de la Poste at Avallon, can that be right?

  Have just heard from Hugh French that Ustinov is ecstatic about our enthusiasm re Hammersmith is Out. Shall have a quick word with Peter's partner Alex Lucas, I think, today at lunch.180

  JULY

  Friday 3rd, San Felipe, Mexico Drove into Mexicali yesterday, took a room for the day at the Lucerna Hotel, phoned Elizabeth, borrowed a bell-boy from the hotel and raided supermarkets for food and bits and pieces for the apartment here.181 It was delicious talking to E. I had wondered why I felt so peculiarly lost without her this time of parting as we have been apart before for a couple of weeks – when I was in Geneva two years ago and Ivor had his accident and two or three years before that when she went to California when her dad had his stroke and a few days when she went to Paris for the funeral of Gaston's son – but suddenly realized why I felt so lonely this time. Reason being that before we were always able to talk on the blower but not so from here. So for the first time in my life I appreciated the normally despised telephone. I talked to her twice in a couple of hours! She will be here in a couple of days. Hip! Hip! Michael! She said she missed me as badly as I missed her and that she mooned about at night and felt almost tearful over a pair of my socks that she saw hanging about. [...]

  I feel extraordinarily fit since I talked to her and feel as young as 25 or something. Stopping drinking is the best thing I've ever done for my physical well-being. Twice since I arrived I was immensely tempted to have a drink – once when I was alone. This is the kind of place and the kind of situation where one is naturally driven to booze. Waiting for the film to start, waiting for the tanks and guns etc. to get here, the uncertainty of the Mexican immigration [...]

  However, we do start work tomorrow so they told me last night.

  I have been learning the German I have to speak in the film from a German actor who plays the part of Schröder.182 He invented the reason for yawning. He is so boring that it is almost hypnotic. All I ask him to do is speak the lines for me and I will write it down phonetically in my own way and then learn the whole thing off like a machine-rattle. BUT he expatiates on every line. ‘I do not zee Cherman think would say to a check-point man dese thinks mit deses words’. So doing a page of script consisting of perhaps 3 lines of German for me, takes a full hour. I faint with ennui. ‘I disapproove of all military thinks and should not be doing ziss film but one must work I suppose and you are much admired in my country.’ He has a great soft white face and refuses to go into the sun, and a large elephantine bum and belly. He is most unattractive and his smile is horrifying. He gives the impression of unredeemable smugness. But the new Burton says ‘Yes, I see, of course, quite, See your point. Yes "krankenhaus"’ is right but you think a cultured German might say "Hospital" with the accent on the last syllable so good let's say that because our chief public for the picture are English-speaking and it's good if they recognize a word that is common to both languages.’ instead of: ‘Look, just speak the bloody lines for me and bugger off.’ I am so tolerant and understanding that I frequently give myself a nasty turn.

  I am still surprised and pleased at the impact of my name on people. I arrived (with Brook) at the Hotel in Mexicali, unannounced, yesterday and within minutes was waited on hand and foot. The people in the supermarkets – we went to three altogether – were without exception delighted to see me, and all proffered advice on where to go and what to buy and all seemed delighted that I
spoke Spanish. I like being famous. I wonder how I'll feel when I'm not. After twenty years of it now and a further few years I suppose it will feel very strange to be R. Jenkins again as it were. The manager of the hotel reserved a room for us at the hotel – a suite I mean, which is three rooms in effect, – even though it's his biggest week-end of the year, being the 4th of July. The young boy, terribly pretty and looking about 15 but is actually 21 and answering to the name of David was in his seventh heaven showing us around the shop calling out to his friends as we passed them in the hired Impala which I drove. ‘Gustavo, Como ‘sta?’ He was a proper little lord for a day. ‘I will be waiting for you when you come back and I will tresore your Elizabeth Taylor,’ he assured me when I left.